7/16/2007 @ 6:00PM

America's Fastest-Growing Suburbs

Los Angeles is sometimes called the “Sultan of Sprawl.” But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the country’s fastest-growing suburbs. Not a single one falls in the L.A. metropolitan area.

Instead, Angelenos are packing their bags and heading 60 miles east to San Bernardino, where twelve of the country’s 100 fastest-growing suburbs are located. Leading the pack? Beaumont. It has experienced 130% growth since 2000.

It’s easy to understand why. Home prices in the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area are 30% less expensive than in L.A. Add comparable household incomes to the mix, and the move from the basin to the valley makes sense.

So much sense that San Bernardino’s rate of net domestic migration has near quadrupled since 1990, while the Los Angeles metro posted negative net migration figures over that same period. Last year, it lost 72,000 more residents than it gained.

Our list was compiled using U.S. Census growth data from 2000 to 2006 and provided by Demographia, a St. Louis-based research firm. Since a city’s metropolitan statistical area is defined by the counties it encompasses, Demographia excluded those outlying towns which were in suburban counties but didn’t have significant economic and social ties to the big city. Suburbs included cities, townships and villages that had more than 10,000 people in 2000.

Behind The Numbers

The fastest-growing suburb in the country is Lincoln, Calif., just outside Sacramento. Its population jumped from 11,746 to 39,566, or an increase of 236%. The fastest-growing big suburb (with a population of 100,000 or more) is Gilbert, Ariz., outside Phoenix, which expanded from 112,766 people to 191,517.

While not cheap by national standards, the growth in Sacramento’s outerlying areas is strong because it’s a less-expensive alternative to Los Angeles, San Francisco or San Diego. The Phoenix area saw the greatest positive domestic migration of any American metro last year, with 115,000 more people moving into town than leaving. Affordable housing and a growing economy draw a lot of people to the city.

In Texas, for example, geographic growth is almost completely unregulated. Not surprisingly, the Lone Star State has the lion’s share of the country’s top-growth suburbs, 20, 12 of which are in the Dallas-Forth Worth metro area.

As a result, these areas have some of the most affordable homes in the nation, since there is plenty of supply to meet demand. But transportation expenses are often high. In Houston, such costs are the No. 1 household expense, according to the Brookings Institution.

Cities that engage in restrictive growth policies find themselves with different trade offs. In Boston’s inner suburbs, including Chelsea and Cambridge, zoning and growth restrictions designed to prevent sprawl backfire because they force people to look farther outside the city for affordable housing. According to the same Brookings Institution study, metros with growth exclusion plans like Boston have the most expensive housing stock in the country since there is a limited supply of homes close to the city.

This becomes particularly problematic in northeastern and Rust-Belt cities that are losing population. Places like Phoenix and Las Vegas are spreading out faster than Boston, but they are doing so more efficiently, meaning with a more concentrated population.

Last year, just over 16,000 more people left the Boston metro area than moved in, yet the suburbs continued to expand geographically. The result is a thinning of the area, which makes Boston more of a sprawl, if sprawl is defined as the density of population over a geographic space.